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Why read a book about a television series that is no longer being aired? Pop culture, by its very nature, moves on to the next hot item, feeding the hunger for the new. But eventually some television series become so old that they are “new” again and can be reclaimed as “classic,” gaining a second life as retro-hip artifacts replayed on TV Land1 or as nostalgic bulletins from simpler times for a more harried society (the widespread syndication of The Andy Griffith Show, for instance). Occasionally some shows catch fire with a cult audience that recirculates and repurposes the original text (creating fan fiction romances for The X-Files’ Scully and Mulder or analyzing Twin Peaks in the magazine Wrapped in Plastic, for instance) and thus remain current in the everyday lives of their devoted fans.2 Between these two points in time, between the current and the antique, television texts either become fodder for filling twenty-four-hour cable programming grids or disappear. These texts disappear from academia as well. The study of popular television tends to follow the practice of popular culture, focusing on the latest fad or on historical artifacts. Both of these research pursuits are important. Academics need to act at the moment, to take advantage of the wealth of data available when a pop culture phenomenon occurs, and we need to do the difficult work of reclaiming the appeal of popular culture from the dust of history. But, although the temptation is strong, we need not mimic the dynamic of pop culture when we study it. In a widely circulated email guide to publishing, an editor of a leading academic media journal recently asserted that essays about contemporary media are more “attractive” when Int ro duct Io n Why Ally?  iNTroduCTioN they treat a “hot” topic: “there was a moment when work on Ally McBeal was really hot, but now the show is canceled and that moment is over.”3 Pop culture necessarily is of the “moment,” but the study of popular culture need not be.4 When academics valorize television because of its currency, we propagate one of the basic societal positions concerning popular media: they are evanescent and therefore not worthy of prolonged, serious attention. Imagine my opening question being asked about other media: Why read a book about a play that is not currently produced? Or about poems published in a magazine? Keeping television shows around makes economic sense (they may find a new market through syndication), but in terms of their intrinsic value, only a rare few critically acclaimed series “deserve” to be treated as something other than disposable. Here I argue something more than a simple “we need to claim more television shows as classics.” We should recognize that our own emphasis on the currency of television treats the medium as being worthy of study because of its contemporary popularity (for instance, the rise of Buffy studies in the wake of that show’s cult following). Without current popularity—or without reasserting its historical value as a beloved commodity—scholars of television seem to believe there is little reason to explore a television show. Complexity of narrative or the beauty of construction can justify critical consideration of a novel or a film, but when a television show is no longer au courant, these considerations matter little. As long as my opening question rings true, we are accepting the notion that television is basically bad and can only be reclaimed academically when it is directly, socially relevant. The burgeoning field of popular television studies has certainly done much to take television off the garbage heap of culture, asserting that texts from Alias to Dragon Ball Z can produce interesting insights. And yet the way that television studies tends to approach series still contains hints of the assumption of the medium’s inferiority. The dominant mode of television analysis treats programs as an instructive nexus of more important discourses, a highly public site of struggle where social contestation occurs over what it means to be a woman or a man, a homosexual or a heterosexual. A popular television series provides a particular configuration of elements (themes, characters, buzzwords) that activates and tweaks the larger social discourse in vivid ways. Television shows are better at energizing one side or another of a broader debate than they are at subtly advancing their own specific arguments. The construction of the program itself is therefore less important than the way television (as arguably the most...

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